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Friday, December 16, 2016

Cock-a-Leekie Soup...okay, it's just fancy chicken soup

Cock-a-Leekie Soup

I made Cock-a-Leekie this week, a very old, very simple chicken soup
recipe from Scotland (could you tell from the name?) that lets me get
the most out of a single chicken–with fresh hot roast chicken and
chicken salad as stops along the way, of course. (Cock-a-leekie was
mentioned being served at a knight’s table in 1598–THAT is an old
recipe!) It’s a great use for some of that wonderful ever-changing soup
stock.

(Full disclosure...the original of this entry was from my old Live Journal, katequicksilver, but I've brought it up to date.

Anyway, actually, first you take a chicken, but I couldn’t resist the old saw.

Some recipes call for potatoes, but we don’t eat many spuds for a variety of reasons; since the Joy of Cooking* didn't include potatoes in their version either, we felt fine about skipping them. (That is still my favorite cookbook, old and tattered though it is! It's been my "kitchen bible" for more years than I care to admit!)

Besides,
who needs the starch, carbs, empty calories, and an overabundance of
nightshade family members, which my arthritis rather dislikes. (During fried green
tomato season, however, I just hurt and to heck with it!) If you do
use potatoes, I imagine you already know that most of the nutrients are
in and just below the skin...which of course you don’t want to eat if
it’s been sunburned. (The skin will be green, if that’s the case. Not
good.)

(Whole 30 and the Paleo/Primal crowd used to suggest NO potatoes, but that stand has been softened a bit, so we do eat them on occasion...)

Other variations call for rice or barley, but my simple version is delightful, delicate, traditional, and easy, and we generally do without grains these days and feel much better for it.

We
get whole roast chickens at our grocer’s*–they use what they call “Smart
Chickens” by which they mean hormone-free, antibiotic-free birds fed on
grain–no animal by-products. You can read more about them here: http://www.smartchicken.com/ch.php

Sounds
good to me! If you buy a whole bird to roast yourself, it costs about
as much, and takes time and fuel. We save a step, and so our first meal is always fresh, hot, juicy roast chicken, as soon as we get home from the store!

If you’ve got a good source of free-range chickens, though, GO for it! Delicious...

(We
eat what we want, and pull the largest of the meat off the bones, then
simmer the bones in the soup stock, above–5-7 cups of stock. If it’s
not strong enough for you, you may give it a boost with one of the
commercial stock options, forgive the pun. I like "Better than
Bouillon" Chicken Base*
, which got the best reviews in the gourmet mag I picked up to read
while we were having the truck’s brakes fixed last month. (Please don’t
ask the name of the magazine, I don’t remember! Next time the brakes
give out, I’ll look...)

I
let the bones bubble an hour or so in the stock, then strain them out,
let them cool, and pick off the small bits of meat, usually gleaning
another cup or so. Return the meat to the pot, along with however much
of the larger meat you set aside. Cut to your preferred size–my late
husband liked large chunks so he didn’t feel deprived–he grew up just
after the Depression; J. likes smaller bits, and so do I. (We saved
enough back for chicken salad!)

Leeks
are not as cheap as bulk bags of onions (here, about $2.50 for 3
good-sized ones), but oh my they are GOOD. You could substitute
scallions or regular onions, of course, but the taste would be a bit
stronger.

Cut
off the large, tough green end and the roots of 3-6 leeks, then slice
the stalk lengthwise. Open the “leaves” and rinse well–they may be
sandy. Then cut into short half-moon lengths–like less than 1" long–and
add to the pot.

This time I also added celery root and carrots, which made it hearty...

Simmer
till tender, then add ½ cup heavy cream (the original recipe), sour
cream, or even fat free plain yogurt, if you like (you can make your own–it’s not
hard. But we’ll talk about that another time!) I added a bit of fresh
ground pepper and sea salt (but skipped the dairy, this time.)

Try
it with herbs if you like–they’re not in most recipes I could find and
the soup is so wondrously rich and savory it doesn’t need them. I doubt
it would have been quite that good without the homemade soup stock.

Historical Note: The traditional recipe calls for the addition of
prunes, which I’m going to have to try next time! I love savory
fruit-and-meat-and-onion combinations...but by the late 18th C. French
gastronome Talleyrand suggested cooking the prunes in the broth but
removing them before serving. Whatever!

Some of the green part
of the leeks will be just too tough for soup...but you can simmer them
with the chicken bones (yes, again!) to add to your stock pot. What’s
left–except the bones–can go onto the compost heap along with the really
tough part of the leek tops and the roots.

This is lovely in the crock pot, too...this time, I put it in about 1:00 p.m., set on high, and dinner was ready when we got home at 4:30. Delish!

*For speed and convenience, last night I used organic chicken breasts from Costco, which tasted just fine!

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We started doing Starving Artists in the Kitchen on my original blog, The Quicksilver Workaholic, in the fall of 2008--and it was time to break out! So here we are, new blog, new recipes, and we hope, even more new friends.

We've moved away from the Standard American Diet, which seems to have made more people less healthy rather than MORE, and it's been good for both of us. We're pretty close to Primal Blueprint/Paleo and not only lost weight but lost a bunch of health problems along the way, so our recipes reflect that.

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